Fulbright Orientation

Wow, where to begin? OK. Guadalajara is huge…4.5 million people. No, Mexico City is huge, at least 22 million people. Overwhelming to say the least, but wonderful all the same.

Last week was a full week of orientation for the Fulbright program. This year there are more than 80 Fulbrighters, the largest of any previous year. Tim Wright, who is a Roanoke College graduate as it turns out, and his crew kept us busy throughout the week with speeches and presentations by experts in Mexican history, human rights, and politics. In between these presentations, we had a chance to take some quick, but informational tours of Teotihuacan, a prehispanic community of over 300,000 people just outside of Mexico City. There we climbed the Pyramid of the Sun and learned as much as we could from our knowledgeable guide in a few hours.

We also visited the Palacio Nacional, where famous Mexican painter Diego Rivera has several massive murals depicting the history of the land of Mexico and its people. I could have stared into that mural for hours, but as was typical for the week’s activities, we had more to do than we had time for.

The best part of the week, bar none, was meeting the other Fulbrighters, some of the smartest and most interesting people I know. We spent the week learning about eachother’s projects, interests, specialties and, most important, where each person is going to live in Mexico. One of the great things about this program, is having fellow grantees living in so many different and interesting places, and being able to visit one another.

Each Fulbrighter and their dependients as their called (which is Missy) were invited to a Mexican Fulbrighter’s home for dinner on Wednesday night. To give you an idea of how large this city is, Missy and I rode in a taxi for 2 and a quarter hours and were still in the heart of the city. We finally made it to the home of Cesar and his two siblings and his parents. Cesar will be doing his Fulbright next year in the U.S., in either L.A., Massachusetts or Georgetown, studying international relations. His mother cooked us the best tasting pozole, a soup of hominy, chicken and sauce, and we stayed until after midnight talking, sharing information on music and Mexican and U.S. traditions. It really was a wonderful night.

Thursday night was the big dress up time. I had to buy a tie and nice slacks before I left Guadalajara, because we attended a little welcoming party at the home of the #2 in command at the U.S. Embassy. It was interesting seeing the Fulbrighters all dressed up after spending a few days sitting together in jeans, or climbing the pyramids of teotihuacan. It was also the night of Barack Obama’s acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention in Denver, so just as we got back, about a dozen of us crammed into a hotel room with a bottle of Tequila to watch the speech about an hour late on MSNBC. It was a wonderful Fulbright moment, I thought.

It was sad to say good-bye after so many packed days with so many wonderful people, but we did a lot of cell phone and email exchanging at the close of the week, and made promises to travel to one another’s homes for visits or even collaboration on work. We’ll definitely be making a trip to the state of Queretaro, where Jose and Naomi will be working with art therapy. I have to go there anyway to back-track the path of the Otomi, and now we have friends to visit.

Instead of heading back directly to Guadalajara, we were lucky enough to be taken in by David, who showed up to pick up four of us for a night out, with none other than my host in Guadalajara, Danielle, who made a quick visit to Mexico City for some great news. She was invited to be a part of a national panel of experts on children’s rights and relevant issues. So, Missy and I spent the weekend in David’s very modern, very cool (see pictures of his coffee table/stove design) apartment in the hip neighborhood of Coyoacan. The laid back weekend gave us a chance to catch up on sleep and visit the Frida Khalo museum, which luckily is in the neighborhood.

I should be back to more regular postings now that I’m back in Guadalajara.